


Pisces Virgo Rising

by thegoodthebadandthenerdy



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, First Dates, First Meetings, Meet-Cute, Pre-Canon, Road Trips, and for the record i think cj's a taurus, spoiler danny's the pisces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:22:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23145367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoodthebadandthenerdy/pseuds/thegoodthebadandthenerdy
Summary: Back before the White House or the campaign trail or even Triton Day, C.J. took a drive to clear her head and met a helpful journalist along the way.
Relationships: Danny Concannon/C. J. Cregg
Comments: 6
Kudos: 17





	Pisces Virgo Rising

**Author's Note:**

> i'm not gonna lie to yall the title is a nod to danny's song by loggins and messina lmao i wrote this whole fic bc of it

CJ tucked her hand over her brow, cutting through the glare that was snaking over the lip of her sunglasses, useless dollar section purchase that they were. Not even dollar section—dollar _rack_ on a gas station counter that, when you spun it, held obnoxious bubblegum and wet wipes on the other side.

Her good, sturdy sunglasses—purchased from a catalogue, for the record—had been lost somewhere between her last stop and wherever she currently was. The specifics of both her and her sunglasses’ geographical positions were hard to ascertain. What wasn’t hard to pinpoint was how she’d lost them.

She’d had the thought to pull them off long enough to curb the pressure building behind her eyes and under the bridge of her nose, and just as quickly they’d been taken by the wind, flashing somewhere along the interstate while her car shot forward and her hand curled into a loose fist.

Maybe the vultures would enjoy a pair of statement glasses. Maybe she’d inspired some little carrion-eater to pursue its dream on the fashion circuit. Or maybe she’d punctured someone’s tire with the miniature rhinestones that had been imbedded at the corner of the eye and the karma of their mechanic’s bill would hunt her down and throttle her in her already restless sleep.

She sighed and angled her hand harder to block an extra lick of sun, staring off over the bleak landscape before her. In her hand was a gas pump, chugging away at the tank of her car, waiting for the kickback from the fill line. The sun seemed to have been dipping below the horizon for hours, a perpetual, deserted dusk that kept hanging around to mock her. And what an easy target she was in her laser eye surgery fashion du jour, looking five to seven years older depending on which way your abacus ran, and undoubtedly as out of place as a sore thumb on an otherwise perfectly healthy _foot_.

The nozzle lurched in her hand, drawing her back to earth, and she saddled it back at the pump. Cranking the lid on her fuel tank, she then smacked the cover into place with a well-practiced lefty. It needed a real shove, otherwise it’d get locked about an inch before closing and she’d have to pry it open again, leaving her fingernails scratched and her fingertips reddened.

Sparing a wave and thin smile for the woman behind the counter that was watching her like one of those aforementioned vultures, she loaded herself into the driver’s seat and cranked the engine.

Idling only long enough to buckle had been her plan, but that swiftly shot out the window when her thoughts tried to order themselves in the same amount of time. As it turned out, she had a lot more going on up there than was the legal limit.

A few minutes passed of her white-knuckling the steering wheel, radio cut off and engine taking shuddering breaths, thoughts racing past like…things that raced past at the limit of velocity. Her jaw was surely something close to slack and her eyes, well, it was a good thing she’d retained motor function because she had to look verifiably dead behind the eyes.

Before she could set up shop at pump three of the mom and pop out off route nowhere, the fine-eyed cashier shouldered through the door. It was the reverse charm of the bell that snapped CJ from her hypnotic whimsy, sent her hand over the gearstick as her feet worked the pedals. She didn’t need to get trapped under Mother Hubbard’s scrutiny again.

The tires screeched as she fled the parking lot, but she was only able to make it a minute or two down the road before the hysterical laugh climbing up her throat burst out and she had to pull into the nearest parking lot.

Incredulous giggles popped like bubbles in the air as she handled the old convertible into a wane parking space, the white lines barely there if they ever even had been. She killed the engine and the keys hung limply from the ignition when she was finally overtaken.

Hemming and honking, she gasped for breath, her hands delightedly beating the steering wheel, her feet stamping as her whole body was wracked with breathless delight. Tears sprouted in the corners of her eyes and streamed down her cheeks, a test for the thin layer of black mascara she’d applied that morning in her rearview mirror.

When at last she couldn’t breathe, she rocked forward and notched her forehead in between her hands, the smooth steering wheel cover warm under her skin. Drawing ragged breaths in through her nose even as her shoulders still shook, she watched the tears slip off her face and hit the dusty mat underfoot. The car could stand for a good cleaning, but she hadn’t wanted to push her luck at any of the gas stations she’d found herself in over the last couple days. Getting quarters for the vacuum seemed like asking too much from her luck.

Her track record since she’d gotten the offer from Triton Day had been less than stellar, but she’d been foolish enough to think that taking her old car out for a week-long trip would override all that and help her make some decisions regarding the state of her life. Mostly, it’d just given her more problems than she knew what to do with and a headache the size of her hometown.

CJ was sentimental. It had been the thing that almost killed her when she left Ohio once, twice.

Adjusting to the time difference came easy. Learning her way around Massachusetts and then California was an adventure, gave her something to do in the time between classes. Meeting people, keeping up with her course load, trying to decide what she was going to do with her life in the four year interim that was undergrad and the three years after in grad school all came stupendously easy.

Her sentimentality, though, her one crux. She missed the girls from her basketball team—Friday night games and dinner afterward where they’d all jam themselves into tables at the local pizza place—so every October around the time the season started back home she got a little misty-eyed.

Going down to the bay on the weekends with her grad school friends, she’d look out across the water and remember her dad in his fishing gear waking her and her brothers up at five in the morning so they could get to the river by six, all of them smashed together on the bench seat, singing ridiculously out of key to the old country station the radio was always tuned to.

It wasn’t _nostalgia._ She didn’t want to go back to that—the hell of SAT prep, practicing day in and day out to remain best on the team, the feeling of water getting in her coveralls when she tripped over the unsure riverbed. But it was like she couldn’t remember it enough, had to associate everything in her new life with it so as not to forget the old one.

So she’d gone home once she graduated for the third time. Master’s degree in hand, she showed back up on her dad’s doorstep, boxes stacked in the back of the car that still fit in the garage. She reconnected with all the people she’d so quickly left behind, visited her old haunts for the first time in seven years, let her sentimentality get her drunk enough to tell people she’d missed them while she’d been gone. She thought she’d stay six months, a year at most, take a break, collect herself, dive back in once the time came.

And then somehow it had been three years and she was in Dayton more than she wasn’t, but she had an offer from Triton Day and hey, wasn’t that something.

She wanted to be able to say that there had been some kind of doubt in her mind that she was going to take the job, but that was a bald-faced lie. A hotshot PR firm out on the west coast—well, it wasn’t exactly what she’d imagined doing, but it was two thousand miles from Dayton and that seemed more in line with her philosophies. Never mind that she’d never actually imagined doing anything in her life—a fact she’d gotten pretty damn good at hiding, thank you very much—at least she wouldn’t stay in her hometown forever, something her mother had never wanted for her.

That thought finally sobered her; her hitching breath evened out, her tears dried. She felt lighter than she had all week, but no more sure of where she was headed.

Sighing, she fumbled for the rearview, spinning it around to see her out of whack curls and sparkling eyes. She stretched over the gearshift and smacked at the glove compartment until it sputtered open and spat out a handful of crumpled napkins. Tidying her eyes first, she tossed the balled up napkins back and slammed the compartment shut again. Her hair was mostly intact the longer she looked at it, so she prodded at it a few curious times before resigning herself to the fact that it was as good as she was going to get.

She reached for the keys, ignoring the jagged edge of one of her keychains digging into the meat of her fingertip. Already anticipating the comfortable hum of the engine under her feet, it took maybe a half second too long after she cranked the car to realize it didn’t come.

“Oh, no, no, no. _No,_ ” she commanded, eyes wide and hand uselessly flicking the key back and forth. The engine whined at first, then coughed up a half-hearted sputter that inspired everything but confidence. Her hand tightened around the steering wheel as she tried it again, but it still refused to miraculously turn over.

Slumping in her seat, she hissed a handful of _damnit_ s for her own sanity before popping the hood with one hand and lurching the door open with the other. Her sandal slapped the asphalt as she clambered out of the car, throwing the door shut behind her. She stalked around the front and set the hood pin in place, bracing her hands along the front end to look down at the inner workings.

CJ knew a little bit about a lot of cars, but she’d been prostrate and devout to this particular one since she was fourteen. Her dad was a Ford kinda guy, so it hadn’t been a surprise when he wheeled the ’66 Mustang convertible into the garage all those years ago. He was hands on, too, so when he and her started tinkering with it that very day, well, CJ hadn’t been shocked on that account either.

She’d been allowed to drive it a few times after she got her permit, but on her eighteenth birthday her Dad signed the title over and suddenly she knew what it was like to have a prized possession. It was her baby, no doubt about it. Not only had hers been the hands that brought it back from the brink, but it had been her behind the wheel for the last ten years from one coast to the other in every imaginable combination.

She’d done breaking down on the side of the road, getting the top jammed right before it started to rain, learning detailing as a therapeutic practice. She’d worked a job more to keep gas in it than anything else, yelled at people to keep their grimy feet off her dash, fooled around with her fair share of boyfriends and girlfriends in the backseat.

Which was all to say that she knew the car better than she sometimes knew herself and that was why she was sure the battery was dead.

Still, it felt good to lean over the engine block again, keen eyes tracing the familiar pathways. It had sat in the garage for the last four or five months out of something like spite—the car was a part of her every life, but looking at it reminded her she didn’t know where it went next—so before she’d loaded up for the week with no place in mind, she’d done a cursory refresher.

But the battery hadn’t crossed her mind. That just went to show how off her game she was.

“Just needs a jump,” she muttered, leaning harder into her hands until the cold metal warmed under her touch, reverberating her own heat across her palms. “Go find the jumper cables, Claudia Jean. That’s step one.”

She pushed off the car and headed around the passenger side to the trunk, her fingers finding the latch and popping it with a satisfying sound. Her bags were stuffed to the left, a duffel of clothes and a smaller one for toiletries because she’d be damned if she used hotel toothpaste.

On the right was her amalgamation of a kit. Kitty litter and a jack and a spare. Cold apprehension spiked through her when she didn’t immediately lay eyes on the black and red of her jumper cables, but she didn’t panic, no, no. She ducked into the trunk, reaching as far back as she could with her shirt riding up her back all the while. She closed her hand around the handle of half a bottle of anti-freeze, clasped again on her first-aid kit, even found the ugly blanket she’d started stowing there in grad school when her then-girlfriend had taken to stargazing, but no dice on her savior.

The realization that she didn’t have them processed and was accepted quicker than it would for most. There wasn’t anything she could do about the fact that they weren’t there. A real what can you do moment as it were.

What she could do, it turned out, was snap, “ _Fuck!_ ” at top volume in a parking lot that she hadn’t exactly checked the population of while slamming her trunk shut.

A low laugh sounded just ahead of her, not cruel but amused, and she snapped her eyes up to find the culprit. He was two spaces over standing beside what was clearly a rental—because no one owned a car that nondescript—mouth twisted up in a jolly smile that he seemed to be aiming at his front left tire. And jolly was the right word, with his pinked-from-the-heat cheeks and sort of…soft something or other crinkled around his eyes.

His eyes. That were now looking at her looking at him. Shit.

She ducked her own back to her hands, the middle and forefingers tapping accordingly on the trunk lid. Two beats later, she hazarded another look up and found him there still, looking like he was going to say something.

Silently this time, she had to curse herself for the stripe of giddiness that trounced up her spine. Now was decidedly not the time for that, no matter how cute he might be.

“Hi, there,” he called amicably, batting lengthy orange hair back from his eyes.

When she threw back her own, “Hi,” it was a touch miserable, but that was to be expected.

“I couldn’t help but overhear,” he explained, gesturing broadly. “You, uh, need some help over there?”

Her shoulders twisted in and her lips thinned, but she put on a brave enough voice. “What I need are the jumper cables that—if I had to guess and I’m a fairly good guesser—are in my father’s truck a state or so back.”

He nodded, understanding. “Would you be willing to settle for the set I’ve got in my roadside preparedness kit?”

“Aren’t you a good little boy scout?” she asked, her teeth sinking into her cheek just as soon as she said it. There was that old CJ Cregg luck—someone was willing to help and she scared them off with her snark. She hadn’t even meant for it to slip past! Weren’t there provisions for leniency in situations like these?

Instead of souring his expression curled up into real amusement, laugh sandy and sweet. “Well, they only gave me the one badge and that turned out to be an A for effort and an F for application, but hey, I take what I can get. That a yes?”

“You don’t have to, if you’ve got plans here—” She finally looked up to her unfortunate waystation, finding that they were in the parking lot of a combo bingo hall and bait and tackle shop. “At the…‘bingo bass-h,’ don’t let me stop you. I’m sure it’s a real hoot.”

He laughed again, shaking his head as he sunk back into the driver’s seat of his car. “I’m not really in the market for a hoot, I'm just hoping they've got a map,” he explained as he cranked his car on the first go and craned his head over the seat to back out of the parking space. Moving into the one next to her, he killed the engine.

When he climbed out of the car the second time, she was able to get a better look at him. He was her age, she supposed, with a dust storm of orange freckles and a head of thick hair that rivaled her own. His beard and moustache, the same peachy color as was on top of his head, were trimmed back to a manageable length, and though she’d never really gone for facial hair, she could see the merits of it in relation to his case. Casually dressed in a blue t-shirt and jeans, she noted it was a good color on him, made his eyes twinkle if you were into that kind of thing.

She’d been known to appreciate a good eye twinkle in her time.

“Here we go,” he said from the trunk, a pair of jumper cables raised victoriously. “You wanna do the honors or…should I?” He squinted at the cables, lips unconsciously thinning, and CJ had to try to stifle the laugh at the base of her throat.

Crossing her arms over her chest, she smiled beatifically, and motioned on with one hand. “No, no, that’s okay, you go ahead. Since they’re yours.”

He bobbed his head a few times, seemingly weighing his options between his hands as he shifted the cables uncomfortably. Eyebrows bunching together, the light hairs sparked the sun, so faint in that moment that they almost looked blonde. Clucking his tongue against the back of his teeth in defeat, he finally declared, “I’ve gotta be honest, I never actually learned which ones go where.”

“Didn’t think so, sparky.” She nabbed the cables from his hands as her tongue pressed between her teeth, and there it stayed while and after she shooed him off to pop his hood and throw the parking break on.

He came back while she was laying the cables out on the ground, brushing his hands off on his jeans. “All right, what’s next?” he asked, not even looking at her but instead studying the layout before her with real conviction.

Peeking over her shoulder at him, she studied the earnest lines between his eyes just over his nose. From all she could tell, he wasn’t joking. And when he finally turned to her and caught her eyes, his eyebrows went up his forehead in prompting. A _well?_ if she ever saw one.

It brought her back to herself like a well-timed shock. She turned away from him again and let her voice find its usual dryness to tell him, “What’s next is you’re gonna go park yourself behind the wheel and wait for my signal so you don’t get the shock of your life.”

“Oh, c’mon, don’t you think I could stand to earn this badge?”

“What’s your name?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your name. I’m asking your name because it’s harder to boss you around if I don’t know it.” Not impossible, though.

That seemed to amuse him. Everything she said seemed to amuse him. But he stuck his hand out and supplied over their perfunctory shake, “Daniel Concannon.”

She’d always believed a good handshake should be an acknowledgment, not a greeting, and this one was just that. Not too long or forceful. Enough to tell her that she liked the way their hands lined up.

“And do you prefer—”

“Danny? Oh, yeah, but there’s been debate on what sounds better in print, so it’s up in the air. What about you, or should I stick to calling you Mustang?”

“Well, Danny, if we’re doing the whole name, it’s Claudia Jean Cregg. Mustang to my friends.”

“CJ?” he tried hopefully.

“That indeed. No fancy reason, it’s just that four syllables is four syllables too many for most.”

“You seem like a CJ.”

“Oh, I do?” 

He back-tracked expertly, a faint flush creeping from underneath the neck of his shirt and up his throat. “I just mean, Claudia Jean’s a great name.”

“You’re damn right it is, but if I had to hear it get butchered every day I’d have to be committed. Now, either stand back or have a seat, _Danny_.”

He elected to stand back while she went to work hooking the clamps to each car. At every step he’d ask, “What are you doing now?” and she’d tell him, explaining what little reasoning she could remember. For the most part, this was all muscle memory to her. This goes here and that goes there and god willing nothing catches fire—that kind of thing. Wasn’t that a painfully accurate view of her life now, little fires cropping up because she’d lost her touch to the years.

It didn’t take long to get everything attached accordingly—like riding a bike, car maintenance was—meaning she was able to send him back behind his wheel quickly enough. He could follow instructions that much was clear. Didn’t stop her every muscle from screwing up so tight she’d be working kinks out for the next week.

“Just start it,” she was telling him, her hands held up like Ringling’s interim animal tamer. Oh please God in heaven, cried out the Catholic marrow still in her bones, oh please just let this not backfire. “Don’t do anything else yet, just crank it.”

When she heard his engine turn over, she slipped behind the wheel of her car and physically crossed her fingers. It wasn’t often she so brazenly showed her hand like that, but just this once she let it slip. Maybe it was humility she needed to show to get things moving again. If that was the case, then call her the patron saint of self-effacement and slap her face on a medallion.

Looking over at Danny, she found him doing the same thing a little more shamelessly. Hands balanced at the wrist on the steering wheel, dancing back in forth in time to a tempo she couldn’t figure out. Almost like he could feel her curiosity, he looked over and gave her a smile in blinding reassurance. She didn’t want to admit it, but it brought her a semblance of comfort.

“Now what?” he shouted over the sound of his engine.

“Now you start praying if that’s your scene!”

The usual minute passed in anxious tension. Though she longed to ignite her engine and fly far past this particular watering hole, she kept herself glued in place, another minute going by. She hoped it would be enough to put her on the other side of things.

Shooting Danny one last look—a selfish act, she just wanted to see that smile again—she reached for her keys.

The car shot to life with such a roar it drowned out her and Danny’s simultaneous cries of victory. Hers pitching higher than she’d heard it in years and his elongated as he hauled himself back to his feet. They locked eyes over the roof of his car, just as shocked that it had worked as they were to feel such a rush of camaraderie. Scrambling to get to one another, they smacked a double high five when they did, hanging onto one another’s fingers just long enough to be noticeable.

It was the closest they’d been since their calamitous meeting and she could smell something sweet on him. If it was shampoo or cologne, she wouldn’t bet on it, but it lingered at the forefront of her mind longer than it did in the air.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she babbled over the lingering buzzing in her fingertips. “Oh, you don’t understand the day I’ve had. Seriously, Danny, thank you.”

“Hey, it’s no problem. I’d have needed to donate those things if I didn’t get any use out of them sometime soon. You helped me out.” His lips twisted up into that lilting, amused smile she was already becoming increasingly familiar with and he shoved his hands in his pockets. His own offering of humility.

An uncomfortable silence stalled between them, their eyes flicking around each other’s faces looking for some reason to unearth the words stuck in their throats. CJ pinched the skin on her elbow thoughtfully, eyebrows drawing together overtop her curious eyes, but Danny beat her to the punch.

“You got anywhere to be, Claudia Jean?” he asked, a premature wince ducking across his shoulders. He sounded unsure, of all things. Maybe she wasn’t as good at this as she remembered being.

“I’ve got a few,” she offered, but the tilt of her mouth was encouraging.

“Anywhere pressing?”

“There’s ones that aren’t?”

He scuffed his heel backward on the dusty pavement, looking up at her with renewed relief. “So, dinner?”

“Thought you’d never ask, carrot top. No fish, though, right?” She hitched her chin toward the big ‘bingo bass’ silhouette tacked up in the window of the fine establishment they’d found themselves waylaid in. She’d always liked the act of fishing more than the reward of the catch, the scrape of water on stone, the slickness of scales under her fingertips while she worked the hook out of a slimy mouth. The bingo bass just gave her all the more reason.

“Unless you count the fact that I’m a Pisces, it’ll be a fish-free affair.”

“No kidding. Pisces, huh?”

“February 29th. It was always a touchy subject among us kids when I tried to call the best seat on the couch using eldest sibling privileges.”

“I’m the youngest in my family, Danny, I’m gonna have to agree with your siblings. You either made it to the seat first or you forfeited, none of that reservations crap, especially not from the kid who only has a birthday every four years.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked amusedly, “Well it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. I might have to borrow your I.D. to try and get a beer around here, some wise guy always tries to tell me I look a little _young_ to be drinking.”

She clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle her barking laugh, but it pushed its way between her fingers. Waving her other hand to sweep it away, she took her bottom lip between her teeth and ducked her eyes to the picture of their shoes met on the pavement to try and compose herself.

He had on cruising shoes, old sneakers that clearly weren’t meant to see the light of day, but she liked the way they looked ahead of her color-coordinated chipped nail polish and five-year-old sandals. If only she could take a picture of that, carry it with her like those people that kept lengthy photo albums in their wallets.

“Okay,” she said, still swatting at the air. Danny watched her with an even-keeled expression, eyes smiling, mouth unspeaking. “Let’s see if we can’t find anywhere around here that’s got food enough for humans, then.”

About ten minutes down the road sat a squat brick building with a green metal roof. For all intents and purposes it looked closed until she saw the even more squat sign out front. It boasted the words Chinese buffet and open in the same sentence, and that was all she needed. She could’ve cried out in delight—didn’t, but could have. She did have some composure left.

Danny flicked his blinker on and whipped into the parking lot, almost taking his bumper out on a curb he swore up and down hadn’t been there five seconds before.

“It came outta nowhere, Ceej, I’m telling you,” he crowed from the walkway, hands animated around his face while she collected her purse from the floorboard.

She shook her head, stuffing her keys into one of the slouching pockets in her purse as she met him. They took off side by side, CJ shooting one last worried look at her car over her shoulder. Danny’s eyes followed her gaze and he almost said something encouraging, but her face visibly smoothed as she gave a tiny, incredulous shake of her head and she faced forward again. Crisis averted.

She lugged the door open and ushered him in with a playful swat, complaining about how she wasn’t gonna wait all day for him. He was still smiling when he greeted the hostess that met them on the other side of the vestibule, asking if they had a table free for a few weary travelers—a comment that made CJ bury a snort in the back of her hand.

“Gesundheit,” Danny muttered under his breath and she swatted his shoulder again.

They found their seats at a lonesome table shoved in the back corner only after barely making it through the buffet line in one piece, too busy tittering like a couple of kids who’d snuck a flute of champagne at a wedding to focus on their plates.

She wasn’t even settled in her chair entirely when she started to bust her chopsticks out of their thin paper wrapping. Waiting for some cosmic starting gun wasn’t in the cards for her, she hadn’t eaten since that morning—too lost in her thoughts and the wind in her hair to remember lunch. If she hadn’t needed to stop for gas, there was a good chance she would’ve driven straight through dinner, too. And then what the hell would she have done? Her closest relatives were a day’s drive away at least and it wasn’t like she was a card-carrying member of AAA.

Funny how different her night would have gone if she’d made just one decision differently.

“So,” she started, snapping up a clump of noodles and eyeing him under her eyebrows. “I’ve been trying to figure out what you meant by ‘better in print’ for the last hour. What exactly is it that you do?”

Surprise touched his face in a shade close to bewilderment. Endearing enough that she let him work out his words without any ribbing. He dropped his straw into the roiling caffeine of his cola and said, “Sorry, just feels like everywhere I go everyone already knows—I’m a journalist. And y’know, even though I got the degree and applied for the jobs, I never thought I’d actually get to say that and mean it,” he explained, exhaling mirth. Forefinger extended, he twirled his straw, ice clattering roughly against the hard plastic cup.

“So you always liked to write, then?” She looked between her plate and him in steady tandem, breaking only to sip her tea. So bitter it made her toes curl, and wasn’t that just the way it was supposed to be.

“I had the predilection for it, did well in English class, that kinda thing, but I’m the cliché. I didn’t realize how much I cared until I joined the school paper in high school. It kind’ve took off from there. What about you? What’s got you all the way out here?”

Her stomach curdled, but she kept shoving noodles in her mouth anyway. Anything to not have to admit _oh, I don’t know_ , and have the conversation crash to a halt. She could see it: they’d finish their meals in quiet, split the bill—or maybe Danny would insist on paying, she didn’t know what kind of guy he was—and then they’d go their separate ways. He’d remember her years down the line as nothing more than the random woman he’d found in a parking lot, running from her life. Not that that was an inaccurate description, though, was it? All her life she’d strived, but it didn’t mean a damn thing if she didn’t follow through.

He was kind enough to duck his eyes while she tried to factor an answer out of the shitshow running through her head. Embarrassed, she realized in her frantic consideration for how their night _might_ end she hadn’t bothered to remove her chopsticks from her mouth so there she sat in perpetual mid-motion. When she yanked them clean her teeth scraped unpleasantly along the woodgrain. 

On the bright side, the prolonged silence gave her the opportunity to look him over. Gleaning the basics from someone was all well and good, hair color and the cut of their jib could tell a lot. But it was the little things she wanted know more than anything, like the way his hair fell over his forehead when he tipped his chin forward and the way his fingers couldn’t stop moving no matter what.

He had great hands. They were vibrant and speckled, competently working his chopsticks in a way that made her think of a pen and a pad of paper and a little newsboy cap. Wide knuckles and fingers she thought would be shorter than hers if they lined their palms up. Blue veins cast green in the light. And would you have it, a class ring with a ruby inset, but not a wedding band in sight. Miracle upon miracles Danny Concannon’s hands were.

“If you can believe it, this is my last hurrah before I take a job in California,” she said. It sounded careful, but at least it was honest. “But answer me this: why journalism? Why not the next great American novel. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Concannon.” She could see him as a writer, he had that look.

Like a fish eyeing both the hook and the worm, he took the bait between his teeth. Unlike a fish, something in his eyes told her they weren’t done talking about California.

“Ah, I’m not too good with the sitting around and waiting game. I had this roommate in college, he wrote novels—the most gorgeous prose, I swear. But I’d never seen anyone sit around and wait for words more than him. He said the story was inside of him and he just had to figure how to get it out.”

“And you?”

“I think the story’s already out there. I just want to find it first, put it to paper before it can get away.”

She didn’t know if she believed that. Sure the facts were out there, but putting it together? That took a writer’s touch. No one wanted undiluted reporting, they wanted it to be cut up and neatly served. “That’s pretty quixotic, don’t you think?” she asked not unkindly and he responded just the same.

“Asks the woman going to Hollywood.”

“Hollywood-adjacent,” she corrected without thinking. There wasn’t one person on God’s green one that had been able to get her to say a word on Triton Day since she got the call, yet here she was parlaying with Danny about it like it was an old joke. To be fair, she resented the insinuation she was selling her soul off to Hollywood. She had to draw the line somewhere, retain some measure of integrity.

“And I’m the cynic. I’m the guy in the movies that tells it like it really is to the idealistic journalist. Straight-shooter Cregg, that’s what they’ll call me.”

He crooked the corner of his mouth. “Around the water cooler, maybe.”

“Oh, a girl can dream. I’ll be the talk of the PR firm.”

Tucking his chopsticks into the pile of shrimp-fried rice he’d tacked onto his plate at the last minute in the steamy buffet line—he’d nearly dumped it over his feet, caught up in the way her eyes shone under the lights—he asked, “Why the cynicism and PR firm, then? Since you got to ask me, it just seems fair I get to do the same. You’ve got to have something that lights you up from the inside out.”

“And you’re _sure_ you’re not trying to edge your way onto the bestseller’s list with fancy word-work like that?”

“Full disclosure, I am gathering for my memoirs—you gotta start early with these things. Now, quit dodging the question, CJ.”

She lined her chopsticks up beside her plate so she could clasp her hands together under her chin and level him with a half-look. Half-smile, half-curiosity, half-amusement. “Oh, I don’t know, Danny. I’m vain and shallow and like a quick buck. They appealed to my sense of _womanly vanity_ by telling me I looked pretty and then they wrote me a signing bonus enough to buy you a printing press to launch your own little newspaper that could.

“See, the thing you gotta understand about me is that I’ve never known what I wanted to be. Not one day or hour of my life, not even as a kid. Ballerina, doctor, astronaut, celebrity chef, none of it ever put a fire under my ass. But what I _have_ known since the day they christened me Claudia Jean and sent me out into the world is that whatever I end up doing, I’m going to have to give myself over to it whole-heartedly. So I’ve waited, I’ve dicked around for a few years because I’ve got commitment issues. But you know what? I’m tired of waiting, I really am.

“So I’m done worrying about what’s behind door number three. I’m like one of those thoroughbred horses—I’ve got my blinders on and I’m not paying anyone any mind anymore. I’m going to deposit my _egregiously_ large checks and invest in something worth investing in and hope it pays off in the end so I can retire by fifty.”

Her cheeks had flushed somewhere around the first breath she’d drawn, but they darkened now as she realized how sharp she’d been. She hadn’t meant for it to be anything more than a flippant brush off, something long enough that it seemed like an adequate answer, but when you thought back on it, you realized it didn’t give much of an answer to anything at all.

That probably went out the window somewhere around admitting her inadequacy all the way down to childhood, but such was life. This was a dinner—albeit nice and cozy, as comfortable as it was familiar—with a man she’d never see again. So what if he thought she was crazy? What was he gonna do, put it in his paper? He couldn’t even figure out what name to publish under.

“Hey, CJ, hey,” he called, knocking his ring against his cup a couple times to produce a dull thud loud enough to draw her attention back to the present. “I believe you.”

She needed to reset, go back to before she ever blurted that. Low in her stomach seeded the knowing that she didn’t _want_ him to believe her. Anyone else, sure, it would make her life easier without the friction, but stubbornly all she wanted was for him to give her anything else except his belief. It seemed like too much of a responsibility, gold for a faulty product. No, she didn’t want his belief like this.

Placinging her thumbs to the underside of her chin she asked, “Yeah?” Her voice was weak.

“Yeah, everything but the bullshit that just came out of your mouth. That part about investing was good, though, you should keep that one—you ever thought about a career in financial advisement or, uh, I dunno, public speaking?”

Despite herself, her face split into a slow grin. Of course. “That’s just what the people need, me yelling about stocks like some sort of business-minded chicken.”

“You’d make a very cute business-minded chicken.”

Like the dam had broken, words started pouring out of CJ. Without the obvious to dance around, she found stories to regale him with. In turn, Danny freely gave anything and everything she could ask of him. He was endlessly interesting, bouncing around from paper to paper, writing whatever they handed to him until he’d pulled himself to some kind of standing to start asking for what he wanted.

They were like-minded, but not copycats. CJ having no problem throwing in objections and holding Danny’s feet to the fire when he talked about stories of his career’s past, and he definitely not stumbling when he called her on her bullshit. But on some things they were strangely in synch, down to when they pushed their chairs back in tandem to go back for seconds even though they hadn’t discussed it. When they came back, their plates were again filled, and Danny was carting a plate piled high with those little doughnuts covered in powdered sugar in the crook of his elbow.

“I worked at this diner back home when I was fifteen. Jack’s. Three time employee of the month ‘til they fired me to hire the boss’s son,” he explained when he caught her impressed look. The plate had never even so much as wobbled.

“The cruel sting of nepotism,” she supplied in commiseration.

“That it was.”

They chattered for what felt like minutes, but instead was pliable, punch-drunk hours. Cleaning their plates, draining their drinks, jumping in with _that reminds me of_ , time was a concept they’d both shed.

CJ ripped a few of those doughnuts down to shreds mindlessly. Her fingers sat sticky and sparkling, her completely unaware because she was far too engaged. Content, too. She didn’t need the fluffy sweetness of confectionary when her mouth was already coated in an endless stream of words. Didn’t want anything to distract her from how she laughed harder than she had in years, or from the way Danny’s shoulders hiked up to his ears when he really laughed, or how his face softened when he thought she wasn’t looking. That stoked a fire in her chest she was trying, no matter how futile, to stifle. It didn’t stick, but at least she could say somewhere on the other side that she had tried. Never mind that she’d also kept digging, taking every answer he could give her and trying not to love the way they made her feel.

It was the little things that plucked away at that old sentimentality of hers. He had a younger brother and sister that he loved fiercely, but as all older siblings felt it wasn’t his right but his duty to give ‘em hell. He liked basketball more than he liked football—was more fascinated by her high school stats than any date had ever been. He was from Michigan, but was between places, out chasing stories at breakneck speed and not worrying about where he’d rest his head until night fell.

He asked her, “Where’s home for you?”

And she said, “Ohio, originally. I don’t know now.”

And that was quite all right by him.

Danny knew when to push, when to ask another question or dig deeper to get a real answer because he genuinely wanted to know her truth. Not in a journalistic way. Just with an acute sense of humanity.

So with prodding that she welcomed, she told him about her brothers, about her five-year-old niece that she adored and knew wouldn’t be the only one for long because they weren’t a family of only children. She told him about almost failing one of her finals in undergrad after an Aristotelian congruence of events, running across campus with no shoes on in low double digit weather to get to the lecture hall in time—how free she had felt, never mind that if her friends hadn’t cared for her, she probably would’ve lost some toes.

But just as well as he knew when to pry, he knew when to quit, too. He’d back off just as quickly as he found a subject. Veering far away from talk of parents when he saw the quiet look in her eyes at the mention of mothers. Not once mentioning California again as it pertained to her future in three days’ time.

And so their hasty part thank you, part date became a right moment, right time. The intersection of two life stories that weren’t so different after all for five sure hours. If they’d had it their way they would’ve stayed their all night, but eventually a pained-looking waitress came around as CJ let out a particularly loud honk of laughter and had to break it to them that the restaurant was closing for the night, so could they please pay their bill?

CJ nabbed her purse as Danny reached for his wallet, their eyes meeting in question over their dirty dishes and melting cups. The condensation from CJ’s drink had leaked onto the napkin she’d halfheartedly stuffed under it, turning it sluggish and gray, just like the aura over them now.

Being the one to break their standoff, she offered to get the bill if he got the tip. It was an arrangement they could both agree on, so when she walked ahead to settle their tab, Danny quietly slid a twenty into the waitress’s palm and thanked her before bustling to catch up with CJ’s long strides. 

The handle digging into her back, CJ held the door for Danny once again, her arms hanging by her sides to be nipped at by a chill that had snuck its way into the air while they weren’t looking. The door swung shut behind them as they headed for their respective rides, but they missed the employee coming behind them to lock it up, a silhouette that came and went, when they stopped in the meager foot between parking spaces.

Cradling her awkward elbows in the palms of her hands, CJ exhaled, meeting Danny’s eyes. They looked at one another like they didn’t want to forget.

She wished she had more to say, more hours to give, more miles to share, but their night had come to its most natural end and she knew when to let things go. Sometimes it was the kindest thing to do.

“I hope you get there first,” she said softly, her chaperone lashes ducking. She couldn’t just leave him with a _nice to meet you_ , no way.

A grateful smile. “I hope you figure out what you’re going to invest in.”

Before she could talk herself out of it, she unfastened one of her hands and pressed it to his elbow. His skin was chilly pink, but soft and giving under her fingertips. She leaned into it just as she did into his space, touching a bittersweet kiss to his cheek. It would have been easy to land it an inch to the right. To let him cup his hands on either side of her face and to let hers roam over his shoulders. One of those movie kisses with shadows cast over the pavement by the lamplight and a swell of music.

It would have been easy, but she couldn’t do it. She didn’t know if it was the respect she’d cultivated in the last few hours or if it was a purely selfish thing, because the thought that if she kissed him and it was as good as she thought it would be and she never got to do it again was too much.

“I’ll see you in another life, Danny Concannon,” she told him firmly, there laying her belief. Regret swept through her, but there wasn’t anything to do about that, either. Onto the next thing.

Hoarsely, he said, “You too, Claudia Jean.” 

She got in her car first because she was young, because she hadn’t learned anything yet, because now wasn’t their time. She got in her car first and did her seatbelt and looked up at him with a dazzling smile to remember her by.

She’d been told a few times by partners of years past that she was too good at leaving. The truth was much worse, in her opinion. CJ Cregg couldn’t leave anyone if she tried. She held onto pieces of them, kept blankets in her trunk and memories like lockets around her throat.

So she watched Danny get ever smaller in her rearview until she turned on the main road and lost him entirely. Following the moon, she remembered him best as a sure-thing under a spray of light, raising his hand in farewell. Or as a laugh holding up a pair of triumphant jumper cables with no forethought to figure out how they worked. Or as a Pisces swimming upstream with threading orange fins that beat everyone else to the punch.

CJ remembered Danny Concannon as all those things and more until she didn’t have to. It seemed she met him all over again as sure and frequent as leap years; though, she never did stay mad, always liking what she got to know too much for that.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on tumblr @foxmulldr !


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